Public domain, story copyright, and intellectual property laws affect the stories about Middle Earth that Amazon can tell. Could this explain why the show is suffering?

Is Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power an adaptation, or a new story? That’s a perceptive question! As of today, only the first four episodes have dropped, and my wife and I have been watching…and cringing a lot.

Still, as a screenwriter, the choices the showrunners made makes me wonder about the nature of intellectual property (IP) and adaptations in Hollywood. Let’s talk about WHAT The Rings of Power is actually based on, and how the producer’s choice of source material affected the show they created.

I won’t be talking much about whether I think the show is good or bad, especially since the whole first season ain’t come out yet. However, I think it’s safe to say that the showrunners’ hands were tied even before they wrote a single page of the show.

In addition to the world-famous The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, many of you likely know that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a history of Middle Earth. called The Silmarillion.

The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are kinda old, right? Wouldn’t they fall under public domain and so Amazon could just do whatever they wanted?

Not so fast! If a book was written in 1926 or earlier, it’s in the public domain. If it was published in 1964 or earlier, it could be in the public domain IF the copyright hasn’t been renewed.

Well, the Tolkien Estate of course renews their copyright. That’s why Tokien’s work is not in the public domain. The showrunners’ hands were tied even before they wrote a single page of the show.

So, if you’re a screenwriter looking to adapt a famous book, make sure it’s in the public domain first. In fact, I did just that with an Edgar Allan Poe poem: I turned it into a short film that screened around the world. You can see what I learned from that as a storyteller in this video.

Now, since The Rings of Power takes place in the Second Age of Middle Earth, thousands of years before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, that means The Rings of Power is based on “the Sil,” right?

Wrong! In an interview with Variety, the filmmakers discuss how they have the rights to The Hobbit and the The Lord of the Rings books — that’s all. But they didn’t make a The Hobbit show or The Lord of the Rings show — they made a “Silmarillion show.”

How did they write a show about the events of The Silmarillion without having the rights to it? Well, they didn’t. They tried to, though.

They used the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, basically a shortened overview of some of the events of The Silmarillion that’s in the back of The Return of the King, and then made the rest up.

If an event is in the Silmarillion but not mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, then Amazon wasn’t even allowed to mention it in The Rings of Power. That’s why Owen Williams writing for Empire calls The Rings of Power “‘extrapolated’ rather than adapted from Tolkien’s work.”

Peter Jackson and his writing team also had to deal with this limitation, but it wasn’t really much of an issue because they had the rights to what they were adapting. 

Amazon? Not so much.

They want to make a big-budget adaptation of the Silmarillion, but they can’t because they don’t have the rights. So they essentially Amazon paid a quarter of a billion dollars for just the IP, and used small parts of it to build off of. In that way, it’s much more like The Lord of the Rings fan-fiction than an adaptation.

Now, WHY did Amazon do this? Because of the power of brand recognition. The Lord of the Rings is a universally known IP, and Amazon is banking on people watching it — even if they hate it, just to see what all the controversy is about.

We’ll save my thoughts on the storytelling strengths and weaknesses of The Rings of Power for another time, but lemme know in the comments if you think The Rings of Power is an adaptation, a piece of fan-fiction, or something else entirely.